She was beginning to look rather disheveled. Beaming at Chandlersurety the woman was rather odd, it couldn’t be just his imaginationshe fumbled in her pocketbook for the slip of paper with the verdict. But she wore an expression of suppressed laughter.
“I knew I had it,” she cried triumphantly and waved the slip above her head. “Now, let’s see.” She held it before her eyes and squinted. “Oh, yes. Judge, we the jury, and so forth and so on”
She paused to wink at Judge Ellithorp. An uncertain worried murmur welled up in the auditorium. “All that junk, Judge,” she explained, “anyway, we unanimously but unanimously, love!find this son of a bitch innocent.
Why,” she ‘giggled, “we think he ought to get a medal, you know? I tell you what you do, love, you go right over and give him a big wet kiss and say you’re sorry.” She stood drunkenly swaying, laughing at the courtroom.
The murmuring became something more like a mass scream.
“Stop her, stop her!” bawled the judge, dropping his glasses. “Bailiff! Sergeant Grantz!”
“Oh, cool it,” cried the woman in the floppy hat. “Hi, there! That you, love?” A man in the front row leaped to his feet and waved to her. The scream became a shout, a single word: Possessed!
“I tell you what,” shrieked the woman, “let’s all sing.
Everybody! ‘For he’s a fairly good fellow, for he’s a fairly good fellow’ Come on now, loves! All together, for His Honor”
The bailiff, half a dozen policemen, the ludge himself were scrambling toward her, but they were fighting a tide of terrified people, flowing away. Possessed she clearly was.
And she was not alone. The man in the front row sang raucously along with her; then he flopped like a rag doll, and someone behind him leaped to his feet and carried along with the song without missing a beat, then another, another… it was like some distant sorcerer at a selector switch, turning first one on, then another. The noise was bedlam. As the police closed in on her the woman blew them kisses. They fell away, as from leprosy, then buried themselves grimly back, like a lynch mob.
She was giggling as they fell on her.
From under their scrambling bodies her voice gasped, “Oh, now, not so rough! Say! Got acigarette? I’ve been wanting”
The voice choked and spluttered; and then it screamed.
It was a sound of pure hysteria. The police separated themselves and helped her up, still screaming, eyes weeping with terror. “Oh!” she gasped. “Oh! I1 couldn’t stop!”
Chandler stood up and took one step toward the door.
So much confusion. Such utter disorganization. There was a chance
He stopped and turned. They would catch him before he got outside the door. He made a decision, caught his lawyer by the arm, jerked at it until he got the man’s attention. All of a sudden he felt alive again. There was hope! Tiny, insubstantial, but”
“Listen,” he said rapidly. “You, damn it! Listen to me.
“The jury acquitted me, right?”
The lawyer was startled. “Don’t be ridiculous. It’s a clear case of”
“Be a lawyer, man! You live on technicalities, don’t you? Make this one work for me!”
The attorney gave him a queer, thoughtful look, hesitated, shrugged and got to his feet. He had to shout to be heard. “Your Honor! I take it my client is free to go.”
He made almost as much of a stir as the sobbing woman, but he outshouted the storm. “The jury’s verdict is on record. Granted there was an apparent case of possession. Nevertheless”
Judge EUithorp yelled back: “No nonsense, you! Listen to me, young man”
The lawyer snapped, “Permission to approach the bench.”
“Granted.”
Chandler sat unable to move, watching the brief, stormy conference. It was painful to be coming back to life. It was agony to hope. At least, he thought detachedly, his lawyer was fighting for him; the prosecutor’s face was a thunder-cloud.
The lawyer came back, with the expression of a man who has won a victory he did not expect, and did not want. “Your last chance. Chandler. Change your plea to guilty.”
“But”
“Don’t push your luck, boy! The judge has agreed to accept a plea. They’ll throw you out of town, of course.
But you’ll be alive.” Chandler hesitated. “Make up your mind! The best I can do otherwise is a mistrial, and that means you’ll get convicted by another jury next week.”
Chandler said, testing his luck: “You’re sure they’ll keep their end of the bargain?”
The lawyer shook his head, his expression that of a man who smells something unpleasant. “Your Honor! I ask you to discharge the jury. My client wishes to change his plea.”
… In the school’s chemistry lab, an hour later, Chandler discovered that the lawyer had left out one little detail.
Outside there was a sound of motors idling, the police car that would dump him at the town’s limits; inside was a thin, hollow hiss. It was the sound of a Bunsen burner, and in its blue flame a crudely shaped iron changed slowly from cherry to orange to glowing straw. It had the shape of a letter “H.”
“H” for “hoaxer.” The mark they were about to put on his forehead would be with him wherever he went and as long as he lived, which would probably not be long. “H”
for “hoaxer,” so that a glance would show that he had been convicted of the worst offense of all.
No one spoke to him as Larry Grantz took the iron out of the fire, but three husky policemen held his arms while he screamed.
THE PAIN was still burning when Chandler awoke the next day. He wished he had a bandage, but he didn’t, and that was that.
He was m a freight carhad hopped it on the run at the yards, daring to sneak back into town long enough for that. He could not hope to hitchhike, with that mark on him. Anyway, hitchhiking was an invitation to trouble.
The railroads were safefar safer than either cars or air transport, notoriously a lightning rod attracting possession. Chandler was surprised when the train came crashing to a stop, each freight car smashing against the couplings of the one ahead, the engine jolting forward and stopping again.
Then there was silence. It endured.
Chandler, who had been slowly waking after a night of very little sleep, sat up against the wall of the boxcar and wondered what was wrong.
It seemed remiss to start a day without signing the Cross or hearing a few exorcismal verses. It seemed to be mid-moming, time for work to be beginning at the plant.
The lab men would be streaming in, their amulets examined at the door. The chaplains would be wandering about, ready to pray a possessing spirit out. Chandler, who kept an open mind, had considerable doubt of the effectiveness of all the amulets and spellscertainly they had not kept him from committing a brutal rapebut he felt uneasy without them… . The train was still not moving. In the silence he could hear the distant huffing of the engine.
He went to the door, supporting himself with one hand on the wooden wall, and looked out.
The tracks followed the roll of a river, their bed a few feet higher than an empty three-lane highway, which in turn was a dozen feet above the water. As he looked out the engine brayed twice. The train jolted, then stopped again.
Then there was a very long time when nothing happened at all.
From Chandler’s car he could not see the engine. He was on the convex of the curve, and the other door of the car was sealed. He did not need to see it to know that something was wrong. There should have been a brake-man running with a flare to ward off other trains; but there was not. There should have been a station, or at least a water tank, to account for the stop in the first place.
There was not. Something had gone wrong, and Chandler knew what it was. Not the details, but the central fact that lay behind this and behind almost everything that went wrong these days.
The engineer was possessed. It had to be that.
Yet it was odd, he thought, as odd as his own trouble.
He had chosen this train with care. It contained eia~”
refrigerator cars full of pharmaceuticals, and if anything was known about the laws governing possession, as his lawyer had told him, it was that such things were almost never interfered with.
Chandler jumped down to the roadbed, slipped on the crushed rock and almost fell. He had forgotten the wound on his forehead. He clutched the sill of the car door, where an ankh and fleur-de-lis had been chalked to ward off demons, until the sudden rush of blood subsided and the pain began to relent. After a moment he walked gingerly to the end of the car, slipped between the cars, dodged the couplers and climbed the ladder to its roof.